OPPOSITION TO HOUSING DEVELOPMENT MISGUIDED

To the editor:

The development proposed for the waterfront is not an affordable housing project. However, If you want the market to provide housing that housing will need to be market rate.

If market-rate housing is constructed, people moving into new units free up older units. If you reject housing because it isn't "affordable" enough, then those who would live in the new housing instead live in existing housing stock, driving up the cost of rent for the existing units and pushing lower-income individuals out.

I challenge anyone who opposes new housing to consider their own housing situation. Do you own your home? Are you comfortably housed? Why do you deny that same right to others?

The claim that objections are not simple NIMBYism is absurd. Suppose this project was 100 per cent "affordable," the same people would be raising objections to the height, or the traffic impact or the design.

The existing housing stock in this city is built on what was once some of the best farmland in this country. Where was the concern about preserving that for future generations?

The people who always object to new housing are, I believe, invariably comfortably housed and do not have the slightest conception of the problems facing the next generation.

If cities do not allow dense housing in urban cores, if they do not allow moderate density in existing residential areas, where are we all supposed to live?

Would you banish your children and grandchildren from the city and remain in a city of the rich and the old? Would you punish the next generation for not being born in time to buy property back when we were still able to get things built?

Building more housing next to a park in no way destroys its value. It enhances it.

JOHN MACDIARMID

BURLINGTON